Every Where You Look: The Game

“I’m giving you a choice:  either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can.” – They Live

“I’m hear to chew bubblegum and kick ass.  And I’m all out of bubblegum.”  (all memes as found)

Most posts aren’t connected, outside of they’re all written by me.  However, the last few have been following a theme that’s pretty old:  mistaking The Game for reality, even Plato wrote about it.  There are times we all get stuck in it.  It’s pretty seductive.  We mistake The Game for reality, often to our own detriment.

What’s The Game?

The Game is where life moves away from reality.  Money (or currency, or cash, which are not the same thing but we’ll use interchangeably in this post) was invented as a way to make trade easier.  Gold and silver were great because they didn’t rust, could be split up in itty bitty increments, and couldn’t be printed.

Money is an invention.  Collectively, humans made it.

We also invented interest rates.  Back a year or so ago (I’m too lazy to look it up) I invited everyone to think differently about the world by changing one simple thing:  eliminate interest on money.

If you haven’t seen the movie They Live, you should.  But when I suggested that “Let’s pretend that interest rates don’t exist,” I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper trying to get Keith David to put on the ZZTop® sunglasses that (spoiler) allowed humans to see that half the people around him were aliens.

I mean, we didn’t get in a fistfight that lasted 20 minutes, but no one wanted to play a different version of The Game.  It was such a fundamental departure from the way the current world worked that people just couldn’t imagine it.

This is what The Game does.

I’ll guarantee that your great grandparents moving across the American West or settling in Kentucky or working a farm in Virginny could have imagined life without interest rates.  Many of them may not have borrowed money at interest at all.

In their lives.

It’s not that money didn’t matter, it most certainly did.  But if you grubstaked a house on the prairie you might have had to borrow a dollar or two until the crop came in, but it was probably to the store, and it probably wasn’t at interest.  Who would even loan against a farm?  Land was free for those that could homestead it.  Banking for everyone is a new invention.  Just like interest rates, it was just a new rule for The Game.

The reason?  Why not extend The Game to everyone so that they could transfer their wealth at six percent per year to the owners of a bank?

Large amounts of society are like this.  It is a large part of why it was so crucial to the COVID tRUsT tHe ScIENce crowd.  This was in a time of general insanity as the “trans-women are women” and “women are exactly like men” and “black people are really oppressed and George Floyd was murdered” hysteria hit peaks.

All of these are symptoms that The Game is afoot, and there is nothing a person who has bought into The Game will fight more than having the rules of The Game challenged.  And if individuals fight hard, the system will fight even harder.

January 6, anyone?

If I were a suspicious man, I’d think this was all an intentional plan to move away from the real to the fantasy world of make-believe things like money.  The transition for money moved from:

  1. Money is something tangible. Gold, yes.  Silver, maybe along with some copper and nickel.  But I don’t trust silver or copper or nickel much.
  2. Okay, gold is so important you can’t touch it but you can keep your silver coins. Only the government.  Oh, and the gold that we just took from you?  We’re going to immediately double its value.  But the dollar will always be backed by gold.
  3. Silver in coins are too expensive to make. We’ll just make them out of base metals.
  4. Gold?   We’re just going to have dollars.  You can buy your gold back.
  5. Pennies? Too expensive to make, we lose money on every single one we make.  We’ll skip ‘em.
  6. Say, have you tried some of this electronic digital cash so we can track everything you buy? So convenient and easy!

The reality has been twisted, and taking your money from you via interest payments and taxes wasn’t enough, they had to take the money, too.  The rules of The Game have been changed.

And me arguing that getting rid of interest rates is a crazy thought experiment?

The way your money was taken the same way your rights are taken.  They are removed slowly, people are nudged.  If you follow the Supreme Court, the plain language of the document has been twisted so far as for some judges to believe that somewhere in the Constitution is the protected right of dual citizens to

  1. Exist, and
  2. Serve in jobs like congressman or as a federal judge.

But, yet, the plain language allowing me to own military-grade weapons means that I shouldn’t be allowed anything more powerful than a shotgun pellet gun bb-gun squirt gun dart gun Nerf™ gun, and my right to the Nerf® gun isn’t absolute.

The rules of The Game have been changed.

Okay, I made this one.

The same way that your rights are taken is the same way your values are taken.

Imagine society in 1950.  Perfect?  No.  If you didn’t mow your lawn, you couldn’t get a job or a loan.  Society rejected you, but those may have been features, rather than bugs.

Likewise, gays couldn’t adopt and certainly couldn’t get jobs where they would be alone with children – that would be insane!  But then The Game changed.  The Catholic Church decided that they could trust gay priests, since priests were celibate and, besides, God loves gay people, too, right?

Ouch.  Not so much.  It wasn’t the “priest” that caused the problem, it was the “gay”.

Gay people existed then.  Not in such large numbers because, for large numbers of gay people today “gay” is a choice.  And back then, the choice was made for you, and communities who had sexual fetishes about latex-covered toasters didn’t exist because there was no Reddit™ to connect them all.

That was better.  Rule changes to The Game have spread farther, faster in our connected world.

But our values have been ripped away via rule changes to The Game.  Nothing is wrong, except thinking something is wrong.  Silly.  The Game is about inclusion.  Even to the point of including people who hate you.  This is what is wrong with the world today.

Yeah.  See what that’s doing with birth rates.  But its also on purpose.  These values have been chipped at every year since at least the 1950s until the only value that The Game will leave you with is the value of money.

And they’ll even take that away from you.

Just try on the damn glasses, why don’t you?

Delayed Reaction: Systems, Cash, and Shortages

“That’s the Lone Ranger®?  I thought he was here to fix the air conditioner.” – Predator 2

My friend’s wife asked him why he had Only Fans® on his phone.  Apparently “to contribute to your sister’s college tuition” was not the right answer.

One thing I’ve noticed in life is that there is always a delay between action and reaction.  If there weren’t a delay, we wouldn’t need watches to see why our spouses were still not ready even though we agreed we were leaving at 9am.

I digress.  One famous example is a household thermostat.  I think I’ve mentioned it before.  In my house, the air conditioner has exactly two settings.

On.

Off.

That’s it.  It doesn’t have a “make it colder faster” setting.  Or a “don’t overshoot and make the water condensing on the windows freeze” setting.  Nope.  Just on or off.

That alone is something that many adults don’t even recognize.  If it’s 80°F (3MPa) in the house, turning the thermostat down to 58°F (6km) won’t make it get any cooler any faster.  It will, however, keep the AC going long after The Mrs. has gone to get a blanket.

I got fired from my job as a locomotive engineer.  Boss asked me how many trains I’d derailed this year, and I told him, “I don’t know, boss, it’s hard to keep track.”

There are many other things like this as well.  Infestation er, immigration is one.  We go from “Well, that was a pleasant new Mexican restaurant,” to, “Can you speak a little more slowly and enunciate?  Or, better yet, get me someone that speaks English,” to “No, let’s not go to that part of town anymore because we don’t speak hindi and they poop in the street,” in only 30 years or so of unrelenting legal and illegal immigration.

Somewhere between 30 years and 3 hours, though, there’s the space where our economy moves in its cause-and-effect loop.

Part of the economy is entirely made up, that being stock prices and cash.  The dollar wouldn’t exist if we didn’t all agree it exists.  Where did it come from?  Well, we made it up.  We first said we’ll print pieces of paper that entitled you to a bit of gold, and when the “bit of gold” part became inconvenient we decided to skip the entire gold part and keep the “we’ll print” part.

That’s fictional.  And it always ends up the same through thousands of years of human history, but, yeah, sure.  This time it will be different.

If we’re lucky, we’ll get food as good as the Soviets had it.  Why, I hear it was so good that people would stand in line for days just for a single piece!

But there’s also a part of the economy that’s based in raw reality.  Rather than trading bits of paper for other bits of paper, or electrons on one storage system for electrons on another storage system, at some point people need to move the actual stuff that all the fictional stuff is tracking.

And that’s real.  I can’t eat a beef future that’s been cooked medium rare since it’s on a hard-drive in Pittsburgh or some place.  I have to wait until I have an actual ribeye in front of me.  Real things are those things that still exists when we stop believing in them.  Anyone here want to buy some francs or deutschmarks?  Thought not.

They don’t exist.

But they used to.  So, by definition, they were only as real as our belief.  What’s neat about imaginary things is you can make as many as you want as quickly as you want.  I think that since politicians spend our dollars with exactly that mindset, they lose the concept that they can’t just print eggs out of thin air.

I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon® today.  I’ll let you know.

No, we have a technology that turns insects into usable protein in the form of an egg, the product of thousands of years of human ingenuity.  It’s called a chicken.  And chickens are real, especially my neighbor’s rooster, who can’t seem to figure out that midnight isn’t dawn.

Real things, like the temperature in my house, are subject to actual physical laws.  And the reaction to an action is sometimes something that may take months or longer.  Let’s take the price of food.  When the price of fuel goes up, the price of fertilizer goes up, and the price of food goes up.

The typical reaction of a politician is to solve the problem by controlling the imaginary lever he controls:  spending more than they have.  Then the Federal Reserve™ uses the levers they control, namely cash supply and interest rates.  Interest rates are an imaginary thing that shows how much extra cash the most recent administration just spent.

But throughout all of this, we can’t imagine a steak.  We still need fertilizer to make the grass grow and diesel to harvest and move the hay, and a cow to eat the hay, and someone to kill and butcher the cow and then some way to get it to my house.

Why are pandas at home in San Francisco?  They’re vegetarians that refuse to breed.

None of that is imaginary, and is all where the physical world intrudes on the fantasy of finance.

And, just like cooling my house, all of this operates on a delay.  The oil is pumped from the ground.  The oil is then pumped into a tank.  It sits waiting for transport.  Then it’s transported to a refinery where it sits in a tank until its turned into diesel or gasoline and put in a tank.  And then it’s shipped to another tank where it sits until it’s put into a filling station tank.  Then it hits the final tank:  the fuel tank of the tractor or car where it will be transferred to the engine and, finally, burned to make useful energy.

At each of those steps there’s a buffer where the oil sits in a tank for some time.  That buffer is the lag in the system, the time between when a shortage starts at any part in the process.  As the buffer disappears, the shortage that cannot be papered over shows up at last.  About 20% of the finished gasoline in the United States is stored . . . in car and truck tanks.

And in six months or a year, we’ll all wonder why steak costs $73.37 a pound and silver $290 an ounce because those can’t be created by changing a computer entry.

I suppose it’s time to save money now for the future inflation crush.  I did tell The Mrs. that there was no need to set the temperature so cold on our air conditioner.  She told me?

“Not a fan.”

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Society, Values, And Waffles

“One time I bit hard into a marble ashtray, thinking it was a savory waffle.” – Anchorman 2

I bought The Mrs. a beautiful diamond ring, but she asked why I didn’t spend that money on a car instead.  Silly wife!  They don’t make fake cars.

I’ve spent hours reviewing why the country I grew up in felt like it ran on autopilot:  lawns were mowed, kids were in school, and front doors were unlocked at night and then turned into . . . this.  The version I see in 2026 feels like it’s held together with duct tape, threats, with little nothing shared.

Friday, I wrote about how real personal change only happens when emotion rewires values from the inside.

I think that same principle scales up to the societal level.

A highly functioning society doesn’t run on rules and cops.  It runs on a shared vision and voluntary self-enforcement:  you don’t have fist fights between naked people in Waffle House® at 3AM where I end up losing a shoe because that’s simply not done.  When that vision fades, you get more rules, more monitors, more guys with badges and attitude.  And the whole thing gets heavier, slower, and meaner.  And less free.

I went to my first Fight Club meeting last night.  I showed up late so I missed the first few rules, but it was awesome!  I love Fight Club!

Let me tell you what doesn’t build a free, cohesive society.

First, someone making people comply.  North Korea proves it works if your goal is terrified people who cry when the Dear Leader walks by and you don’t mind the occasional public execution for wearing the wrong socks.  Compliance by force is easy.  Loyalty?  Not so much. People smile on the outside and cringe on the inside.  That’s not a society.  That’s just a prison with better choreography.

Second, someone with power monitoring me to make me comply.  Remember 2020-2021?  It wasn’t technically illegal to say no to the clotshot, but tell that to the people who lost their jobs, their airline seat, or couldn’t put their kids in school without it.  A whole lot of people who would’ve skipped it folded under the overt pressure of “your papers, please.”  Some complied, without believing.  Big difference between that and the True Believers.

Third, someone moving society to monitor my behavior.  The GloboLeftElite tried to turn the internet into one giant hall monitor.  COVID was the big opportunity.  Disagree on Twitter® about anything, (masks, origins, side effects) and poof, banned.  The goal was simple:  only the approved narrative gets to be broadcast.  The goal was:  brainwash the populace into one artificial shared vision by deleting every other idea.

I was fat but I identified as slim.  I guess that made me trans-slender.

But we didn’t need any of that garbage back when the country actually worked.  Back then we had a shared set of values.  Values kept lawns mowed without code enforcement officers. Values kept people showing up to work, paying their bills, and not stealing the neighbor’s Amazon® packages.  Values were the invisible fence that let a free people stay free.

A huge part of the collapse is the deliberate feminization of society. Women are wonderful creatures.  Their nurturing and care are the reason families exist and babies don’t die in the woods.  But scale that instinct up to the level of national policy and it turns horrifying.

An illiterate military-age man crossing the border illegally triggers the exact same emotional circuit as a crying baby, especially in the spinster wine-aunt who never had kids.  The illegal becomes a surrogate for the kid her barren womb never produced.  Must help.  Must clean it up.  Must give it a chance.

And when it rapes or murders?  Well, punishing it is so mean.  It just needs more care.  That same instinct created the victimhood hierarchy we see everywhere now.  Who’s crying the loudest today?  Which baby gets the most snacks, the most attention, the most special rules?  The entire GloboLeft runs on sorting victims by volume.

I heard that one of Bob Ross’ victims said, “I’m scared” as they walked into the woods.  Bob replied, “You’re scared?  I have to walk out of here all by myself.”

The attempt to replace old values ran for decades through every TV show from M*A*S*H to Maude to Diff’rent Strokes to Golden Girls.  Every single “very special episode” was a Trojan horse.  Archie Bunker® would land a zinger, then spend the last two minutes being proven to be the world’s biggest idiot.

The message was clear:  your grandparents’ values are dumb and mean.  Here, try these shiny new ones instead.

The replacement values, however, weren’t built on what is True, Beautiful, and Good.

They were built on lies.

“There’s only one race, the human race.”
“They’re just like us!”
“This isn’t a nation, it’s a country built only on ideas, not on the posterity of the Founders.”
“Every idea is equally valuable.”
“Love is love.”

The biggest lie of all time?  “I have read and accept the terms and conditions to use this software.”

I could go on.  The lies are finally becoming visible to the general public, the way they always do when reality shows up with receipts.  What’s coming back are the old values, because those are the only ones that actually work at scale.

Getting there won’t be easy.  Societies don’t pivot on a dime.  There will be stunning levels of violence, which is the pain that comes from feminists not understanding that foreigners aren’t the same thing as babies.

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

I think we will win, because we represent what’s True, Beautiful, and Good, and those that represent that will control the switch on the society that rises from the rubble. If the nation that follows is lucky, they will have the shared values that once made voluntary self-enforcement the norm and not the shattered “all against all” values of an India or a Haiti.

Seriously, is this the world we want?

Rejecting Hollywood’s® propaganda, the GloboLeftist victim Olympics, must be replaced by the old, sturdy values, the ones rooted in family, work, truth, and a common language and culture.  Importing millions who share none of that doesn’t enrich: it dilutes until the shared vision evaporates and only the cops remain.

I’m not naive.  The GloboLeftElite won’t surrender the microphone quietly.  The lies have been lucrative.  But lies always collapse under their own weight.

And that shoe I lost at Waffle House®?  I’ve developed a solution:

IHOP®.

Change, Propaganda, And Painting Lessons

“You were looking for a way to change your life.” – Fight Club

His pizza was also burnt and his beer was frozen.  He couldn’t pull anything out on time.

I’ve stared at the ceiling at 3 a.m. more times than I care to count in the past, wondering why some things in my life change and others stay stuck like a rusted engine nut on a ’78 Jeep® pickup.

Change.

It sounds simple.  Turn left instead of right.  Take the red pill or the blue pill or both.  Eat the salad.  Quit the habit I want to quit.  But the real change, the kind that rewires who I am, doesn’t happen because somebody tells me to change.  Change doesn’t happen because the boss is watching or the government posts another billboard.  Change happens when something inside me finally decides it’s time.

And the crazy part?

I control that switch.  No matter what my situation looks like right now, no matter how many birthdays I’ve stacked up, that control is still mine.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work.

But the boarding agent said she could have pie once we got to our seats:  “There’ll be a piece when you are done.”

First, someone trying to make me change.

Forget it.  I’m stubborn.  Bull-headed, really.  Push me, and I’ll dig in like a moist Missouri mule afflicted with mucus.  I’ve sent pushy salesmen packing more times than I can remember.  They come at me with the hard sell, the guilt trip, the “you really should” speech, and my natural reaction is to do the exact opposite.

It’s not rational.

It’s not even smart sometimes.  But it’s me.

Second, someone with power hovering over my shoulder, monitoring me.

Sure, I’ll toe the line while they’re looking. I’ll smile, nod, and change exactly enough to get them off my back.  The minute the spotlight moves, though?  Back to business as usual.  No buy-in.  No real shift.  Just temporary theater.  I know I’m not the only one.

Third, the whole society-is-watching angle.

This is Big Brother with a million little henchmen.  I’ll admit it:  back when I was a kid, the “Give a hoot, don’t pollute®” campaign actually worked on wee Wilder.  I picked up trash and felt good about it.  But that was simple.  Today it’s different.  Now it’s algorithms written for the fat-breasted blue-haired virtue warbler.  It’s social pressure and cameras everywhere, all trying to nudge behavior.

My kids wanted a puppy for Christmas, but I told them they were eating ham like everyone else.

I see it for what it is: a fancier version of the same old “boss is watching me” game.

I might play along in public when I absolutely must, but inside?

Still no sale.

So, what actually moves the needle?

Only one thing I’ve ever found works that works on me or anyone else:

changing values.

And values don’t change because of logic.  They change because of emotion, and not common emotions like “cold” or “sleepy” or “salt.”  No.  Raw, strong, gut-punch emotion.

I posed naked for a magazine once.  The lady at the 7-11® counter sure overreacted.

Take when I became a new father.  One minute the world revolved around me.  The next minute I was holding this tiny human who depended on me for everything, and I realized the universe didn’t orbit John Wilder anymore unless I put on enough weight to create my own gravity well.  That was a big deal.

Not a lecture.

Not a chart.

Just pure, overwhelming emotion.  My values shifted:  “providing” and “protecting” now were more important than “buzzed” and “sleepy”.  Everything else got rearranged around that.

I’ve seen the same thing in guys who barely survive a heart attack.

One day they’re carrying an extra seventy pounds, puffing on cigs, eating like a fat girl on a date with a blind man.

The next day after their slow dance with the reaper?

They drop the weight, kill the habits, start running, and turn into the most irritating health evangelists you’ve ever met, nearly as bad as bicycling atheist vegan transexual Harvard™ grads.

Nearly dying does that, I guess.

When I’m surrounded by my family, with my last breath I want to say:  “Hey, you guys want to see a dead body?”

It’s not a gentle suggestion from a doctor.  It’s terror and relief and gratitude and fear all slamming together at once into the conclusion that there are a finite amount of seconds left on that clock.

Emotion rewires the hardware.

That’s also exactly how propaganda works.  It skips the logic and goes straight for the deepest buttons we have: lust, fear, the need to belong, pain, despair and the need for PEZ™.  Most of them are negative, because negative is easy to manufacture, and negative sticks.

And in 2026 we’re swimming in it.

Screens, news, ads, entertainment are a constant bombardment trying to shift what we value without us even noticing.

One excellent YouTuber® on this subject is Screenwashed™, and he talks about how films are used to destroy our culture.  He breaks down the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways Hollywood rewires what we think is normal, what we think is heroic, what we think we should want.  I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll be before they come to get this guy, but I’d suggest you give him a look.  Here’s one of his videos.

Even I, the mighty John Wilder, am not immune from propaganda.  I’ve caught myself feeling emotions I didn’t ask for after watching something “harmless.”  That’s why I’ve gotten deliberate about what I let into my head.

I pick and choose.

I pause and ask: What emotion is this feeding me right now?

Why?

Does it line up with the man I want to be, or is it nudging me toward someone else’s script?

The external stuff can scream all it wants.  The pressures, the trends, the crises, the propaganda machines can poke and prod and threaten.  But the final decision on what I value?  That’s mine.  Always has been.

The best addiction to have is injecting yourself with brake fluid.  You can stop anytime you want.

We can all flip it.

Not because some expert or politician or trending hashtag told us to. Not because someone’s watching or shaming.  But because we decide to let in an emotion strong enough to move the values that actually run your life.

Starve the propaganda.  Examine every emotion that shows up at your door and decide if it gets to stay.

Change isn’t a mystery.  It’s not reserved for the young or the lucky or the disciplined.  It’s a simple, stubborn fact:  I control the basis of it.  I always have.  And so do you.

The world can keep pushing.

I’ll keep deciding.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Domino Effect

“Let’s say this Twinkie™ represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area.  Based on this morning’s reading, it would be a Twinkie© thirty-five feet long, weighting approximately 600 pounds.” – Ghostbusters

Is it wrong of me that I want this as a t-shirt?

When I was younger, I was reading the book Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis.

In the book, the author related the story of how he was on the trading desk when news of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown hit.  His co-worker, a seasoned trader who’d seen it all, looked at Lewis and said two words:

“Buy wheat.”

The reason was simple.  Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s biggest supplier of wheat.  Now, radioactive wheat would have sounded cool in the 1950s.  Imagine the cereal ads:  New Atomic Pops™: NOW FORTIFIED WITH GAMMA RAYS!

The seasoned trader, however, knew there was going to be a shortage of wheat on the world market since the RDA of uranium isotopes has been decreased under the Make America Healthy Again agenda rolled out.

But Chernobyl happened.  The consequences?  One event, one domino, and the price of bread halfway around the planet starts twitching like a tall tweaker on Tang™.  That’s how fast these things move when the stakes are real.

I’ve moved on to nuclear jokes because most of the chemistry jokes argon.  What, no reaction?

In a more serious world where consequences were to be a thing that actually happened, I’d bet on a huge economic tidal wave incoming from the current Israel-America-Iran War.  Ten to twenty percent of the world’s daily oil supply is stuck behind blockades.  To top it off, 14% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas production is offline, and won’t be able to be repaired until 2029 or 2031.

Then, the Strait of Hormuz:  closing, re-opening, closing again like a game of “duck, duck, missile” has already tumbled a lot of dominos.

Right now, the Strait isn’t exactly a freeway.  Tankers are rerouting, insurance rates are through the roof, and every time someone blinks the flow sputters.  One day it’s open enough for a few supertankers to sneak through.  The next, it’s blocked again and prices expand like Madonna’s face after whatever it is she’s injecting into it.

Those first dominos are easy to spot, and they were the subject of a recent post.  Fertilizer production is down because natural gas is the key feedstock, so (domino falls) food prices are headed up.

Gasoline, jet fuel, and bunker fuel costs are up, so (domino falls) transport prices are up, too. Trucks, ships, planes, and everything that moves stuff from farm to factory to your grocery shelf gets more expensive.

Freight rates for everything from soybeans to sneakers start climbing.  Those are the obvious ones.

But dominos don’t stop at the first few if there are more in line.

I guess we know now who was holding the whole thing together.

Before the big inflation wave really crashes ashore, weird things start happening in the markets.  Gold is up on good news and down on bad news.  Same with silver.

Why?  Because these are assets (at least the paper versions that pretend to be gold and silver) that people can sell fast and clean to cover margin calls, and other ways that they’ve leveraged the market.  Each domino leads to other consequences.

What are the downstream consequences?  Political unrest?  Certainly.  We’ve seen it before.  We’re seeing it now.

When food prices spike, people in places that were already living on the edge don’t write polite letters to their congressman.  They take to the streets.  Empty bellies and expensive diesel have a way of turning into pitchforks and torches.

And what about a complete redo of the world economic stage?  Yeah, that’s a hell of a big Twinkie®, er domino.  But, it’s looking more likely every day.

Here’s the part that should keep you up at night if you’re the kind of person who still believes in fairy tales about “the system.”  In a world where almost any country can convert whatever Christmas wrapping paper they crank out of their printing presses into any other currency almost instantly, why does the world need the dollar?

I’ve been asking this question forever on this blog.

I have absolute certainty that the dollar is the same as a cryptocoin made by Algerian, Albanian, or Albigensian pirates:  it’s a meme.  It’s just a meme that everyone has bought into for 100 years or so.  If I can dump the Zimbabwe Zloty straight into Seychelles Shekels, well, no need for dollars as the go-between as I trade my diseased goats for your rotten cocoanuts.

I heard that the Pharaoh’s favorite cook was Gordon Ramesses.

No need at all.

Marco Rubio even let the cat out of the bag the other day when he said that in the future the United States wouldn’t be able to put sanctions on countries anymore because other countries wouldn’t be using the dollar very much.

Now that’s a huge domino!

It was going to happen.  There was no way the world was going to forever let the United States print dollars forever and have people send us stuff like oil from the Orient or gold from Germany or PEZ® from Paraguay while we shipped them electronic representations of paper money that was now just too expensive for us to bother to print.

We’ve seen this domino before.

I later found out he had a trap door, so it was just a stage he was going through.

A nation that ceases to be a nation and starts to become a financial entity is toast.  One example was Spain.  They pulled in all that New World gold, let their economy wither, and offshored the real work to places like the Netherlands because they could not ditch the Dutch.  For a while it looked like Spaniards were on top of the world.  Then the Indians who gold ran out, and the bills came due.

The final nail in the coffin of Spain, which had been declining for hundreds of years?

When it ceased to be a military power that anyone noticed.  The Spanish-American War was that moment for Spain.  In the end, I think the Spanish were tired of being Spain since it was so much work, and were more than happy for Great Britain to take the helm.

But that was then.  Now Great Britian looks more like Spain circa 1870.

The Royal Navy has more admirals (40) than total warships (25) and only six plausibly active surface warships.  Guess that Britannia shan’t be ruling the waves of anything larger than a hot tub anytime soon.

Most of the time, nothing happens.

Markets drift.  Politicians talk.  Central bankers print and pretend.  Then that domino hits, and it happens all at once.

One day the system is humming along on just-in-time deliveries and faith in the reserve currency.  The next day the Strait is blocked for real, fertilizer plants shut down, grocery shelves get spotty, and suddenly everyone remembers that energy isn’t optional and cold showers suck.  Energy is the blood in the veins of the whole machine.

When the price jumps, everything else has to adjust:  wages, rents, retirement plans, and government budgets.

The dominos don’t ask permission.

The United States had to wait for COVID, but China got it right off the bat.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:  the United States has been running on cheap energy and the dollar’s special status for eighty years.  Both of those props just got kicked.

Hard.  The reset isn’t coming in some distant future.  It has already started.

The only question is how many more dominos have to fall before everyone admits the board has been tipped and the Monopoly™ pieces are stuck in the Cheez-Whiz™ covered Rice Krispie® treats.

In the end, dominos don’t care.  They just fall.  One after another, faster and faster, until the structure is gone.  When the last domino drops, the only thing left is whatever you built that wasn’t made of paper and promises.

And sweet, nutritious, gamma rays!

Remember, Kim Jong Un and Dominos™ have a lot in common:  they can both make a crispy Hawaiian in less than thirty minutes.

Taxes Sucked My Time, Enjoy These Memes Instead

And I’m still doing taxes.  I’m missing a form from a broker, so unless I can get it electronically, it’s extension city.

Ugh.

*update, got the form online, taxes done.  Taxes still suck.

 

 

 

In Which I Discuss What Mustard, Ramen, Historical Timekeeping, Fasting, And Booze Have In Common

“Oh, no.  I gave it up for Lent.” – Fletch Lives

I heard the Pope saw a giant mouse and tried killing it with his bat.  Now he’s the first Pontiff banned from Disneyland®.

I’m hoping everyone had a very Happy Easter, I know I did.  And, if you’re Orthodox, I hope you have a Happy Easter this coming weekend.  I know they’re not the same, and I think that the difference in dates has something to do with the metric system and/or the French, so there’s another reason to hate the metric system.  There’s no real need to find another reason to hate the French.

Regardless, before Easter, there is Lent.  Not every Christian observes Lent.  And, just like The Matrix not every Christian knows what Lent even is.

Last year, though, I became more aware of Lent when a younger person was walking down the hallway at work with ash on their forehead.  Immediately I blamed Gen Z’s lax grooming standards, but then dimly remembered it was Ash Wednesday.

So, I started researching.  What the heck was Ash Wednesday?  Well, it’s the start of Lent.

Turns out that Lent is something more than what I find in the drier after running a load of cotton shirts.  It is 40-day period of fasting, prayer, repentance, and preparation for Easter.  Adam Piggot had a post on fasting/diet during Lent on his now-MIA website, and the fasting part caught my eye.

Things Gen Z has to give up when fasting. (as found)

I’d fasted in the past, so I decided, what the heck.  Lent is only 40 days, so I’ll put up with meager food for most of the week, swear off the elevator (our office has the only one this side of Pixley), and do a bit more research.

They lied.

Lent is totally not 40 days, it’s 46 days.  Apparently, Catholics take Sunday off so they don’t count that in the period.  Then there are a lot of specific restrictions on what they can eat and when.  If you’re Catholic, you already know.  If not, well, look it up.  Summary:  the Catholics have a bunch of rules.

Okay.  Fine.  But my food restriction would last Monday through Thursday since we have family dinners on Friday and Saturday.  In 2025 I decided that would only eat a single package of ramen each of those days, and on Friday and Saturday I could eat whatever the family was having.  Oh, and have whatever I wanted to drink on the weekends.

The Mrs. can’t attend next week’s Innuendo Conference, so I guess I’ll have to fill her slot instead.

Turns out that eating ramen is a great way to make sure you have enough sodium in your diet, which is great if you’re trying to keep your blood pressure up.

But I did notice something else:  whenever I thought about cheating and having something other than boring ramen, I thought about the story of Jesus.  Even if you’re not a believer (I am) the idea of Jesus suffering the whipping and Crucifixion made my “the only thing I can eat today is a package of ramen” seem really small and petty.

Eating nothing but ramen wasn’t going to kill me.  I mean, high blood pressure might, but boring ramen wouldn’t.

That first Lent went fine.

For 2026, I decided to up the ante.  I decided I would start the 46 day period the Sunday before Ash Wednesday.  Why?  Same reason as above:  I’d do my 46 days, but I’d still eat with family on Friday and Saturday for evening meals.

Still not allowed during Lent 2026. (as found)

But from Sunday through Thursday night, five days a week?  I’d eat nothing at all for 120 hours straight, every week, except vitamins.  No food:  not even a mustard packet.  When I mentioned my planned Lenten eating schedule, The Mrs. scoffed:

“I don’t think that’s how you’re supposed to do it.  Are you making up your own rules and start some sort of cult?”

John Wilder:  “Yes, and you can’t join because all of the followers are gonna have to shave off all their body hair and give up bathing for a year and dye themselves blue to show their purity.  Or maybe immerse themselves in vegetable oil for a year.  I’m still working out the details.”

I would have told my cult a joke about Jonestown, but the punchline was too long.

Also, I wouldn’t eat before 3pm on any day but Friday, which is when The Mrs. and I meet up at a local diner to have lunch every week.  So, every week it would look like this:

All day Sunday-Thursday (the very soonest 3pm) no food.

Friday, Lunch and Dinner.

Saturday, Dinner, but no food at all until 3pm.

Why 3pm?

Because that’s when fasts could be broken during Lent in ye olde days.  3pm was the “ninth ecclesiastical hour”, or literally nine hours after the Sun came up.  Back then all time was local.  Noon was when the Sun was at its zenith and midnight was 12 hours later.  Time zones started because railroads required them so they could accurately measure how late the train was.

In Latin was ninth ecclesiastical hour was called None (or “Nona Hora”).  And that’s when the fast for the day could be broken.

Makes sense, right?  Nine hours after 6am is . . . 3pm.

Except . . . when you say that word, None, it’s pronounced like “known”.  And is the basis for a word you’re familiar with.

Noon.

Wait.  Noon isn’t at 3pm.  Noon is at 12:00pm.

In no place except when I lived in Fairbanks was noon nine hours after the Sun rose.

What gives?

The medieval folks were dirty cheaters, and wanted to eat, so since they could only eat after the ninth hour, they pretended that 12:00pm was 3pm.  I am not making any of this up.

Cheaters.

I, however, would not be a dirty cheater.  Except for on Friday.  And since I’m making my own rules in advance, it’s not cheating.

I did not give up cigars.  (as found)

Let’s address the elephant in the room:  on whose authority am I making up my own rules.

Well, mine.  I’m not a Catholic because of the 180-day probationary period and all the paperwork (it might require a Papal decree to get me in, don’t ask) and they wanted a blood sample and a credit report.

Or maybe that was my first job?

Regardless, I’m not trying to meet a particular set of rules.  And my variations were primarily there to keep closer relations with my family.

Besides, the Orthodox start their Lent on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, too and I think you can join them without shaving off all of your body hair and not bathing for a year, though they can eat as much shrimp and seafood as they want during Lent.

No, I wasn’t trying to follow a set of rules with Lent.  I did it for the intent:  to get closer to the Big Guy.

I guess this is why cats were created. (as found)

Also, I’d give up booze for the whole period.

Sigh.  Yup.  All 46 days.  I also resolved to pray, but I didn’t set hard and fast rules on how much and when.  But I did pray.

The results?

I think Lent worked.  I met every goal that I set.  I’m down at least one size on my pants.  Several aches and pains seem to disappear entirely when I’m in a fasted state.

That’s good, and it probably means I should figure out what I’m eating that’s causing it.

I also got 10 more hours of sleep a week, which might sound decadent but it’s really moving from 5 hours a night to 7 hours a night.

And, yeah, I feel closer to The Big Guy and am much more grateful.  The primary goal was accomplished.  If you look at the memes, though, you can see I’m still an awful human being, but we already knew that and at least I feel bad about it now.

Would parts of this work for a non-believer?  Certainly.

Am I asking you to do what I did?

Absolutely not.  This is completely a YMMV situation.

You know who you are.  (as found)

To celebrate the end of Lent, I’m gonna take my cult out for seafood like the Orthodox get to eat all during Lent.  I’m cheap and seafood is expensive here, but tonight we’ll just be one big happy blue oyster cult.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: The Danger Zone, 2026

“Don’t they know you’re in the danger zone?” – Archer

I got kicked out of the bar for attempting to karaoke “Danger Zone” three times in a row.  Too many Loggins attempts.

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  6. Open War.

Volume VII, Issue 11

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., given the open support of assassination and criminality by the GloboLeft and the increase in violence as well as direct interference with ICE and the insertion of the military into law enforcement.  Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Danger Zone – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (link below) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 840 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

Danger Zone

Trump was elected based on the desire of the electorate for change.

The immiseration of the people of the United States had been a constant for decades through both Republican and Democrat.  One example of this immiseration was through pumping the wealth out of workers through things like bringing in unending hordes of illegal aliens as the GloboLeft galloped left at full speed.

The GloboLeftElite loved this because it diluted the Founding Stock of the United States.  The Chamber of Commerce Right loved it because they could get cheaper wages from people who couldn’t really complain about being treated unfairly because they were here illegally.  H-1Bs, who Trump criticized during his 2016 campaign, were just a legal version of illegal strawberry pickers from Venezuela, making wages go down for white collar workers as well.

Trump was elected not only because of that single issue, but it was a very big issue to his supporters.  Controlling illegals had upwards of 80% approval in the 1980s and 1990s, but yet neither side really wanted to stop it because both profited.

In general, by the time Trump showed up, people were very tired of their government working mainly for those with access and cash rather than, you know, the voters.  In this, Trump’s appeal was as a populist, nationalist, and traditionalist.

Well, we can play pretend about the traditional bit, but he certainly sold it.

So where does that put us?

We’ve already seen the early tremors of increased unrest in March:  those four terrorism-linked incidents and the “No Kings” protests that pulled in eight million GloboLeftists.  They were only slightly fiery and were mostly peaceful, I guess.  But the Trump Derangement Syndrome was thick enough to cut with a knife.

I’ve said it before, but my call as the window of peak danger of civil unrest, maybe heading to something spicier is still late June through mid-August

First, the destabilizing bits:  Economic pain from the Iran/Israel military action is the big one.  Fuel prices are climbing, diesel surcharges are right now hitting shipping and farming.  Fertilizer costs will soon be pushing pushing grocery inflation toward 3%

Or 6%.

Or worse.

That’s not abstract.  It’s a hidden tax that hits those with lower incomes first and hardest, and makes everyone irritable.  Add in the war’s unpopularity with polls hovering around 54-60% of Americans against it.  There has been no national proposition given, and certainly no big “rally around the flag” moment.

The GloboLeft mobilizes like they did with No Kings™ and they just want to make things burn.

March already brought terror incidents noted below in the Violence and Censorship Update.  A few more sparks with no arrests and no controls?

The result is backlash cycles, copycats, and overreactions that make GloboLeftist cities feel like powder kegs.  I’m rating it high on the economic front, medium-high on the polarization and protest momentum, medium on the terrorism angle.

All of it adds up an area more prone to wildfire than the land underneath an electrical pole in California.

Certainly, there’s another side.  Trump’s weakened position and the very real shot at Democratic midterm gains will weigh huge in the minds of the GloboLeftist:  they don’t need to burn down Portland (again) they just need to wait.

History shows midterms punish the president’s party when approval sits in the 39-40% range, and right now the numbers point to the GloboLeft taking the House and maybe challenging the Senate.  That gives the opposition a concrete, non-violent outlet:  organize, fundraise, vote, investigate, block funding, block nominees to federal courts, including the Supreme Court (Clarence, might be time to retire, bro).

Anger may get channeled into ballots instead of barricades and barista rage.  We saw the same pattern after big protest waves before on the GloboLeft:  energy shifts from streets to strategy sessions.

The biggest golden opportunity is if some miracle happens in Iran and things go back to normal, quickly.  The TradRight’s base remains pretty cohesive, and if it winds down Maduro-fast, economic relief may (and I stress may) follow.

The other major factor is that Americans have a habit of bending instead of breaking when elections loom.  Post-2020 lessons mean better law enforcement prep and more public fatigue with endless disorder.

Net result?  The system may (again, may) direct the pressure into polarized politics rather than national breakdown.

A perfect storm would look like prolonged war, major terror attack, economic crash with no relief and the sort of political agitation that took George Floyd from dead junkie to St. George.  Don’t think that wasn’t engineered to make Trump look bad.

My timing of greatest risk in 2026?  Late June to mid-August.

Heat and aggression go together like cheap beer, dark bars, and bad decisions.  Decades of studies show violence and collective unrest spike with temperature.  Violence pops roughly 9% higher for every 20°F jump, up to about 85°F.  Over that, the “It’s too hot to do anything” starts to kick in.  But historically, the United States has had to deal with violence peaking during hot summers.

Look at the “long hot summers” of the 1960s, the 1919 Red Summer peaks, Watts in 1965, or how George Floyd protests exploded and dragged through June-August 2020.  People are outside more, school’s out, protests feel easier.

Add the perceptual distance from the November midterms.  If you can’t save enough to pay the rent, an election 3 to 4.5 months away feels like nothing’s happening fast enough.

Summer heat just turns the volume up on whatever tinder already exists.

Pulling the whole thread together: March gave us the preview of early terror incidents plus those historic-scale protests that acted as both pressure valve and polarization amplifier.  The hypothetical Iran mess layers on economic stress and extremism risks that could intensify by summer.

Late June to mid-August lines up as my bet for peak trouble because of the heat, the calendar gap, and the precedent.

The midterm outlet remains the strongest stabilizer.  The Left gets a path to power without needing indefinite street theater and endless pictures of fugly women with unshaved pits.

Keep an eye on June.

(No second story this month, this one got long enough)

Violence and Censorship Update

Violence is back on the menu, boys:

On March 1, Ndiaga Diagne was upset about Iran, and is alleged to have killed 3 and injured 15 after opening fire in a bar in Austin, Texas.

March 7 brought us a moslem throwing a homemade bomb while at a rally of people who were protesting to keep moslems in the United States.

Mohamed Bailor Jalloh went postal at Old Dominion University, but was killed after murdering one on March 12.

On March 28 the “No Kings” protest against Trump saw 3000 plus groups of GloboLeftists claiming a total of eight million protestors, with hundreds of arrests nationally of GloboLeftists initiating violence.

Censorship?

Europe is still king, with more arrests for memes or any opinion on immigration or moslem violence that didn’t regard moslem violence as deserving of praise, so, no change.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers, though this is Trump’s worst month of his second term.

Behold, the Miserito!

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence indicators have maintained a high level this month.  This is one of the top five months of the last 84 (the CW Weather Report started in June, 2019).

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went up this month.  I anticipate it going up again in April, especially since half of the population hates Americans and 40% of the other half don’t want a war with Iran.

Economic:

The economy took a drop this month, and the war in the Gulf will place exponential pressure on economies worldwide.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the near lowest level since the Weather Report started.

Still think this isn’t intentional?

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month.  Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS
https://truthsocial.com/@CitizenFreePress/posts/116229877704839706
https://x.com/KaitMarieox/status/2033675929893937643

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/i/status/2031806808273158565
https://www.wral.com/news/ap/e49b6-gunman-who-shot-2-people-at-old-dominion-university-in-virginia-is-dead-college-says/

ONE GUY
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democrats-claim-thwarted-terror-attack-proves-americans-dont-need-guns

BODY COUNT
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2026/03/17/17_veterans_kill_themselves_a_day_waiting_17_days_for_help_1170858.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/article-15681689/five-states-americans-flocking-leaving-droves.html

VOTE COUNT
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/monfbi-secretly-seizes-election-records-arizonas-largest-county-voting
https://x.com/realmuckraker/status/2034705353133498674
https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/2036527947255788007

CIVIL WAR (OURS)
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54090-how-many-americans-want-their-state-to-secede
https://www.wired.com/story/dont-listen-anyone-who-thinks-secession-will-solve-anything/
https://www.texasmonthly.com/culture/revolutionary-kind/
https://www.lubbockonline.com/story/news/state/2026/03/31/what-to-know-about-newmexit-texas-lawmakers-plan-at-annexing-new-mexico-counties-wanting-to-secede/89368928007/
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-return-of-staten-islands-secession-movement
https://coloradonewsline.com/2026/01/26/colorado-rethink-place-in-country/
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/nation/california/2026/02/06/calexit-what-californias-secession-movement-means/88548491007/
https://thehilltoponline.com/2026/03/02/civil-war-parallels-resurface-as-political-divisions-deepen/
https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/something-civil-war-eric-metaxas-and-james-kunstler-suggest-trump-needs-outlaw
https://zeptabot.substack.com/p/the-techno-libertarian-manifesto

CIVIL WAR (THEIRS)
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2026/03/31/canadas-buyback-deadline-is-here-and-most-banned-guns-havent-been-handed-over-n1232060
https://www.newstribune.com/news/2026/apr/02/in-oil-rich-canadian-province-long-shot-secession-bid-gains-traction/
https://modernity.news/2026/03/28/watch-eu-parliament-told-continent-is-on-track-for-civil-war/
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2g4v9mzxro
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/3/27/who-is-fighting-in-myanmars-multi-front-civil-war
https://religionnews.com/2026/03/26/growing-up-during-sri-lankas-civil-war-taught-me-that-getting-along-with-people-across-divides-is-a-virtue-we-can-learn/

The Academy Awards Suck: Who Should Have Won

“Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!” – Back to School

Yeah, someone’s gonna tell me that M-16 isn’t Vietnam accurate and that Morgan Freeman never carjacked Miss Daisy.

This may be the last of the movie series.  I suppose I could do more in the 1990s, but movies today are just depressing.  I’ll likely just review a few series and movies when they really tickle my fancy.  Enjoy the list, it is what it is.

1985 Best Picture:  Out of Africa

Out of Africa is boring.  Really boring.  It’s 161 minutes of a woman talking about her problems.  I don’t want to hear anyone talk about their problems for 161 minutes, let alone Meryl Streep, who I hate with the fire of a thousand suns.  I.  Hate.  This.  Movie.  I.  Hate.  Meryl.  Streep.

1985:  Should Have Been Best Picture:  Vision Quest

This is such a low bar to beat.  A documentary on the production of aluminum foil would beat Out of Africa in my book, and by a lot, since that might be interesting.  How about Vision Quest?  It has a chick in it, right?  And it’s something much more than the dreary story of a woman in Africa who gets V.D. from her husband.  Nope, it’s about a man who is on a . . . well, vision quest.  Arthur Sido, frequent visitor had a great post on this a while back and I hope he posts it below because I’m too lazy to look it up.

1985 Best Actor:  William Hurt, Kiss of the Spider Woman

William Hurt can act.  He was really good in the TV movie of Dune.  But this movie?  It’s horrible.  It’s a commie talking to a gay guy after being put in a prison by a right-wing South American dictator, so real fantasy material for the GloboLeftistElite that vote on awards for this kind of crap.  Me?  I would have made a movie congratulating the dictator and asking if he got all the commies.

1985:  Should Have Been Best Actor:  Jeffrey Combs, Re-Animator. 

You guys know me by now, and I’m a sucker for H.P. Lovecraft done well, and Re-Animator is perhaps the best.  Yet, best actor to a guy in a B-level horror movie?  Why not?  Seems like the last winner in 2026 was in a B-level horror movie, and Jeffrey Combs knocks this role out of the park, managing to capture the manic energy of crazed scientist Herbert West.  How good was he?  Combs could have remained famous for just this role.  If you don’t like horror, this one isn’t for you, but if like Lovecraft, jump on in.

1985:  Hottest Actress:  Kathleen Turner. 

Sure, she looks like Jabba the Hut® before Ozempic® now, but she was smokin’ in the 1980s, and Jewel of the Nile showed her off pretty well.

1986 Best Picture:  Platoon

I saw Platoon once, in a theater.  It was utterly demoralizing.  I’m not discounting the quality of the writing or acting or cinematography.  Those were there.  And Oliver Stone did spend time in-country and got two Purple Hearts, so realism might be there, too.  But I think this was a priming movie for the 1990s and making America doubt itself.  Making us ask ourselves “Are we the good guys?” is just one step away from “let’s import the third world to replace us, because we’re evil.”

1986 Should Have Been Best Picture:  Highlander

The joy of this movie for me is that it was so fresh, so new, and such a great take on an older idea of what would an immortal man do?  Queen’s® soundtrack meshed perfectly, and although it was a dud at the box office, it had long lasting cultural impact.  Plus?  It celebrates good people doing the right things.

1986 Best Actor:  Paul Newman, Fast Eddie Felson, The Color of Money

Just like Elon Musk forgot Bernie Sanders was alive, The Color of Money was a movie that I forgot existed.  It was meh.  And Paul Newman was a Hollywood GloboLeftElite favorite due to his hard-left positions, so they decided to give him a pity Oscar™ in 1986 for playing the same character he always played in movies.

1986:  Should Have Been Best Actor:  Rodney Dangerfield, Back to School

If you’re gonna give someone an Oscar® for playing the same character in every movie, who better than Rodney Dangerfield.  But he got no respect, let me tell ya.

1986 Hottest Actress:  Helen Slater, Ruthless People.  What can I say?  I have a type.

1987 Best Picture:  The Last Emperor

I thought I saw this?  On video, maybe?  But reading the summary, probably not.  An alternate title:  Sucks to be This Guy.

1987 Should Have Been Best Picture:  Predator

This coming-of-age story about a young girl in Victorian England and the struggles she faces with class . . . HA!  NO!  Bombs.  Guns.  Aliens on hunting trips.  Killing commies.  GET TO THE CHOPPA!  Again, more cultural impact than The Last Emperor.  I mean, did they make six sequels to The Last Emperor?  No.  I do think the last few sequels to Predator have been yet more targeted demoralization, but Predator?  No.

1987 Best Actor:  Micheal Douglas, Wall Street

Yeah, yeah, greed is good.  Whatever.

1987 Should Have Been Best Actor:  Arnold Schwarzenneger, Predator

Hear me out.

In that scene where Arnold is covered in mud and at the bank of the river and the Predator™ doesn’t see him?  I actually bought that Arnold was scared.  Rather than just being a big dude, he actually started acting in this movie.

1987 Hottest Actress:  Kim Catrell.  Fight me.  Loser has to bench press 2026 Kathleen Turner.  Or we could make it a contest:  Kathleen Turner-Overdrive.

1988 Best Picture:  Rain Man

I guess Han Zimmer’s music was good, especially for a movie that’s all about taking advantage of your retarded brother.  And that’s all I have to say about that.

1988 Best Picture Should Have Been:  Willow

I had no preconceptions when I walked in to watch Willow.  It’s a charming Tolkien-esque story about dwarves and brave men (Val Kilmer) who bang hot women (Joanne Whalley) who aren’t nearly as tough as they think they are.  It also stars Warwick Davis, who I really have no desire to imprison in my basement and torture with hand tools during a thunderstorm.  No desire at all.

I promise.

The Warwick Davis digression will make sense to about three of you, but that’s okay.

1988 Best Actor:  Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man

Another proof (like Forrest Gump) that you always win an award if you go retard, but not full retard.  Dustin Hoffman is tool who starred in demoralization movies for most of his life intended to destroy the basic fabric of American life, plus he’s an insufferable gaping GloboLeftElite member, probably only second to Richard Dreyfuss in this club.  Outside of that I’m sure this talentless commie hack who hates you is an okay guy.

1988 Best Actor Should Have Been:  Chevy Chase, Funny Farm

Chevy Chase is another person who has a reputation as being insufferable and serving the GloboLeftElite, but at least he’s funny and racist.  This is easily his best movie, and he plays a self-absorbed liar who is pretending to have talents he doesn’t actually have.  So, it’s a natural for Chevy.  Good movie, and I can’t imagine anyone better to play the part.

1988 Hottest Actress:  Kathy Ireland. 

Yes, she’s hot, but she can’t read so therefore doesn’t know any of her lines.  But she’s hot, which is what this category is for, not acting.

1989 Best Picture:  Driving Miss Daisy

Who was this movie for?  Why was it made?  It’s a made-up story that is (again) a demoralization show about how awful Americans are.  The only thing good about this movie is that, again, Hans Zimmer did the music.  I don’t remember the music, but, Hans Zimmer sounds like a name that could have been a Prussian infantry commander against the French in 1871, and I’m really in favor of that.  All the copies of this movie should be dropped in a pit and everyone involved in the production (except Hans Zimmer) should be sent to Tuvalu without air conditioning until they write 100,000 words of apology without ChatGPT®.  I am likely alone in this opinion, but the rest of you can just be wrong.  Also, how damn long has Morgan Freeman been 70?

1989 Best Picture Should Have Been:  The Experts

John Travolta and Arye Gross and Kelly Preston and Deborah Foreman and James Keach.  What a cast!  The plot?  Stupid Americans from New York are kidnapped and drugged and taken to “Nebraska” which is really somewhere in Siberia to a Soviet spy camp.  Their job?  To teach Soviet spies how actual Americans act.  The hidden remoralization:  the “experts” end up corrupting the Soviet spies who were raised based on a 1950s set of American values.  The ending shows that those values are far superior to the 1980s “modern” values.  It’s a comedy, not a documentary, but, damn, it’s funny.

1989 Best Actor:  Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot

Never saw it.  Daniel Day-Lewis should be banned from Oscar® contention because he can’t figure out what his last name is and he’s Irish Catholic.  Or Irish Protestant.  Whatever.  I guess he was okay as Batman®.

1989 Best Actor Should Have Been:  Anthony Edwards, Miracle Mile

I think about six people saw this movie, which is about a guy who picks up a wrong number at a phone booth (two things that don’t exist now) and discovers that nuclear war (one thing that still does) is inbound in an hour or so.  Or is it?  Great tension, and Anthony Edwards really knocks it out of the park, especially when he pretends to be attracted to Mare Winningham.  Seriously, why would you name your daughter “Mare”?  Good movie.

1989 Hottest Actress:  Kelly Preston, The Experts

Pump it up, homeboy.  Indeed.

That’s all folks.  Foodfight below.  Where are you wrong do you disagree?